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Air Canada’s ‘rouge’ leisure airline is tough on staff: Mallick

The wage-depressing and abuse of Canadian workers stomps along, this time at Air Canada’s lowest-rent version of itself, a “leisure airline” called rouge.

Shouldn’t that be “Rouge” you ask. No, it’s “rouge.” Capital letters are too pricey for Air Canada’s latest trip into discount travel. They can’t even afford training for staff, so staff will be taught “customer service excellence” by the Disney people.

Flight attendants will pay for a portion of their training, some of which will take place in Orlando, Fla., at the Disney Institute (real name) at Disneyworld. At Disney, staff “always reach just a little higher.” Presumably to stuff your wildly oversized carry-on into overhead compartments while the other passengers seethe. Air Canada flight attendants bow to inevitability. It won’t fit. But on rouge, perhaps now it will.

After rouge workers learn to stretch customer service so high, so rare and perfect that the air is actually thinner up there, they will repay Air Canada $49 a month for the next three years to cover their training. If they leave the job, they’ll still owe that money.

And for what? Lessons in servility. Because I won’t cater to the bad taste of small children, I have never been to a Disney funland. But I used to shop at their stores and their staff are trained not to be polite, but oleaginous and grovelling.

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I had a hangover and was buying a stuffed raccoon. “And who is this for, you or a friend?” the young Disney salesman asked me with a wink in his intonation plus an actual wink. (Lesson #1—Pretend you care about horrible customers. #2—Make your voice warble like a country singer.)

“It’s for a child,” I said icily. “Who else wants a stuffed raccoon? An idiot?”

Then I apologized but he was having no more of me. I am Canadian. I have felt guilty about that conversation for nigh on 15 years.

The sweaters are made of a special indestructible acrylic, with sleeves at precisely the unflattering point, post-shoulder, that signals they gave up on their way to the elbow. The pants are tightly cruel to women of any shape and unfashionably baggy on men. Why don’t they just switch?

The shoes are dark grey Fleuvogs, the women’s with double buckled straps, the kind of sinister Rosa Klebb shoes one could plausibly wear in the Italian horror film, Suspiria, where blood drips from the ceilings. The men’s shoes are grey, shiny like new skin over a bad burn, and they have red laces.

I only mention shoes because I have been postponing the hats. They are hipster hats, the kind of thing Frank Sinatra wore when he was playing a Jersey guy on a losing streak at the track. Which is one thing, but those hats are over, even in Brooklyn.

The uniform reminds me of the green smock and perky stocking cap David Sedaris had to wear in his classic essay, Santaland Diaries, when he worked the Christmas shift at Macy’s. “I am a 33-year-old man applying for a job as an elf,” he wrote.

Porter flight attendants wear gorgeous pillbox hats. This is Porter on the cheap, without the charm, the free shortbread or even the ease of flying from Billy Bishop Airport.

So our flight attendants on this plane look like the cast of Glee. Why should we care?

We did this. We passengers worshipped the god of Cheap. We demanded that everything from towelling to children’s toys to lamps and computers be cheap as dirt. We all fly now because airfares are so low that you’d be crazy to drive or take the train or not take that pointless journey at all.

We flick a switch that turns our brains off and we endure the airport and flight hell that ensues. But flight attendants can’t switch off. They have to be alert and servile and save our lives should the “fresh, comfortable and vacation-like environment” that rouge promises head straight down toward the Atlantic.

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